Day: March 9, 2018

If you consider yourself a good cook, you may or may not know how to make a souffle or baklava. But there are certain things you probably do know how to do that form the basis of many recipes. For example, you can probably boil water, crack an egg, and brown meat. With Linux or Unix systems, you can make the same observation. You might not know how to set up a Wayland server or write a kernel module. But there are certain core skills like file manipulation and editing that will serve you no matter what you do. One of the pervasive skills that often gives people trouble is regular expressions. Many programs use these as a way to specify search patterns, usually in text strings such as files.

If you aren’t comfortable with regular expressions, that’s easy to fix. They aren’t that hard to learn and there are some great tools to help you. Many tools use regular expressions and the core syntax is the same. The source of confusion is that the details beyond core syntax have variations.

Let’s look at the foundation you need to understand regular expression well.

We’ve seen some cheap quadcopter builds over the years, but this one takes the cake. After seeing somebody post a joke about building a quadcopter frame out of zip ties and hot glue, [IronMew] decided to try it for real. The final result is a micro quadcopter that actually flies half-way decently and seems to be fairly resistant to crash damage thanks to the flexible structure.

The first attempts at building the frame failed, as the zip ties (unsurprisingly) were too flexible and couldn’t support the weight of the motors. Eventually, [IronMew] realized that trying to replicate the traditional quadcopter frame design just wasn’t going to work. Rather than a body with arms radiating out to hold the motors, the layout he eventually came up with is essentially the reverse of a normal quadcopter frame.

Zip ties reinforced with a healthy coating of hot glue are arranged into a square, with a motor at each corner. Then four zip ties are used to support the central “pod” which holds the battery and electronics. No attempt is made to strengthen this part of the frame, and as such the heavy central pod hangs down a bit in flight. [IronMew] theorizes that this might actually be beneficial in the end, as he believes it could have a stabilizing effect when it comes time to record FPV video.

He mentions that he’s still struggling to get the PID values setup properly in the flight computer, but in the video after the break you can see that it’s flying fairly well for a first attempt. We wouldn’t recommend you tear into a bag of zip ties when it comes time to build your first quadcopter, but it does go to show that there’s plenty of room for experimentation.

At the American Physical Society conference in early March, Google announced their Bristlecone chip was in testing. This is their latest quantum computer chip which ups the game from 9 qubits in their previous test chip to 72 — quite the leap. This also trounces IBM and Intel who have 50- and 49-qubit devices. You can read more technical details on the Google Research Blog.

It turns out that just the number of qubits isn’t the entire problem, though. Having qubits that last longer is important and low-noise qubits help because the higher the noise figure, the more likely you will need redundant qubits to get a reliable answer. That’s fine, but it does leave fewer qubits for working your problem.